![]() ![]() In the years since its release, back in the mid-1970s, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has often found itself touted as the template for every slasher movie that followed. Hooper’s film is nasty, brutish and short, spotlighting a strain of human savagery that feels as old as the hills. It’s the most frightening thing I’ve experienced and I’ve been suppressing it for years.ĭirected by Tobe Hooper on an initial budget of $60,000, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the world’s great rustic horror film the tale of a bunch of innocent kids who stumble upon a household of out-of-work slaughtermen and are then butchered like pigs, one after the other. And all at once the farmer story isn’t funny any more, it’s a full-blown horror nightmare. Then all at once I’m 17, half-cut on scotch and watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on a rented VHS. Remember the funny thing that happened? The furious farmer and the slapstick pursuit? What a right old laugh we had that day. Should be seen by ALL students of cinema at least once in their lifetime.Fear of farms … The Texas Chainsaw MassacreĪfterwards we were keen to frame this incident as a knockabout comedy – so much so that I came to believe it. What could have been sleaze is instead a horrible nightmare experience, sure enough, but one that borders on the transcendental. That the film is so unrelentingly dark and so unbelievably sadistic in its second half, and yet fascinates even as it traumatises, is a definite testimony to the skill of its director. What he obviously had as a director was the kind of daring to take the visceral power that cinema can deliver so well to the limit, to the the edge of acceptability, skirting on exploitation. ![]() Hooper never came close to achieving anything like this again, and many, though not all, of the film's fascinating resonances are a product of the era and the filmmaker's unconscious sensibilities. Now, of course, there is a fluke element at work here. It is something I really don't think any other film has quite achieved, though many have tried. But, as I was on my first (of several) viewings, those I have introduced to this movie have been bowled over by the quality of the film-making, and the filmic techniques (soundtrack, editing, startling images) used by Hooper to capture his "waking nightmare" on screen. ![]() And, with its simple story and powerhouse, unstoppable delivery, it is as open to interpretation as any piece of "modern art" - whether it be from the "vegetarian treatise" angle, or the post-Vietnam traumatised America school of thought. I've shown this to Bergman fans, Tarkovsky fans and, yes, horror fans too - none of them have been prepared for its power, its inventiveness, its willingness to push the envelope of what cinema can do. With its print in the permanent collection at the NY Museum of Modern Art, it truly is a classic of cinema. But Hooper's CHAINSAW is more than just a classic horror film. The fact that the remake's target teen audience (well, at least some of them) appeared to lap it up is just a sad reflection of how far standards have fallen since the heyday of the horror film in the 70's. The 1974 film is the antithesis of the slick, MTV-influenced, cynical cash-in mentality that informed the later remake. Those who have posted here comparing Tobe Hooper's (one and only) masterpiece with the dreadful remake are presumably young children with no real understanding of cinema. ![]()
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